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Obama appears unlikely to threaten new punishments when he meets his Chinese counterpart this week in California — or else the White House might risk long-term progress on cybersecurity while hamstringing cooperation on issues like human rights and North Korea.

Still, the Beltway’s biggest defense hawks are itching to strike. Members of Congress are weighing whether to limit Chinese visas or erect new market barriers for Chinese companies unless the country stymies its notorious hackers. It’s a stark contrast with the more diplomatic prelude to Obama’s face-to-face sit-down with Chinese President Xi Jinping — but one that might ultimately be to Obama’s long-term advantage.

The president likely will play “more of the good cop,” explained Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer at the private cyber security firm Mandiant. He can strike a tough tone on cybersecurity yet still leave the real hardball to other members of his administration, Bejtlich explained.

That approach underscores the reality that there’s no overnight fix to Chinese cyberhacking. As the dialogue continues, though, Obama is likely to point back to Congress. “It’s useful to have these bills to say to the Chinese, you need to realize how much this is damaging the bilateral relationship,” said James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“China is a big country, and they’re not going to fall on their knees and beg for forgiveness,” he said.

Cybersecurity ranks high on the White House’s priority list. New details emerged only last week, for example, that Chinese hackers previously gained access to sensitive U.S. weapons systems, though the Pentagon insists foreign cyberspies didn’t abscond with any key military documents.

Still, the past few months have yielded a deluge of reports all indicting the country as a haven for hackers trying to steal U.S. businesses’ trade secrets. A seminal report by Mandiant, issued earlier this year, even tied one of China’s most infamous hacker groups to the country’s military.

The White House began to address Chinese cyber espionage explicitly and forcefully only this past April, when National Security Adviser Tom Donilon called on the country in a major speech to adhere to “acceptable norms of behavior in cyberspace.” In the months to follow, leading administration officials — including the president — echoed that message.

And the White House continued in that vein on Friday, as spokesman Josh Earnest repeated that the president is “concerned about” the cyber intrusions from China. But Earnest and others have stopped far short of even hinting at any punishments to come. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, speaking on his way to a key conference in Singapore, also railed Friday on Chinese cyber espionage — yet he, too, offered no new indication of penalties on the horizon.

“Unfortunately, that approach is not going to work,” Bejtlich told POLITICO of a long-term White House strategy premised entirely on dialogue. “Just talking to the Chinese is not going to make any difference.”

That’s the fear on Capitol Hill, at least, and lawmakers already are translating their criticisms into legislation.

A new, bipartisan Senate measure, for example, calls for the creation of a “watch list” of foreign countries engaging in cyber espionage. For the worst offenders, the president could “block imports of certain categories of goods if they benefited from the stolen U.S. technology or proprietary information,” explained Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in a letter to Obama last week.